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Objective: To improve home monitoring of heart failure patients so as to reduce emergency room visits and hospital readmissions. We aim to do this by analyzing the ballistocardiogram (BCG) to evaluate the clinical state of the patient. Methods: 1) High quality BCG signals were collected at home from HF patients after discharge. 2) The BCG recordings were preprocessed to exclude outliers and artifacts. 3) Parameters of the BCG that contain information about the cardiovascular system were extracted. These features were used for the task of classification of the BCG recording based on the status of HF. Results: The best AUC score for the task of classification obtained was 0.78 using slight variant of the leave one subject out validation method. Conclusion: This work demonstrates that high quality BCG signals can be collected in a home environment and used to detect the clinical state of HF patients. Significance: In future work, a clinician/caregiver can be introduced into the system so that appropriate interventions can be performed based on the clinical state monitored at home.

In this letter, we present a framework for combining deep learning-based road detection, particle filters, and model predictive control (MPC) to drive aggressively using only a monocular camera, IMU, and wheel speed sensors. This framework uses deep convolutional neural networks combined with LSTMs to learn a local cost map representation of the track in front of the vehicle. A particle filter uses this dynamic observation model to localize in a schematic map, and MPC is used to drive aggressively using this particle filter based state estimate. We show extensive real world testing results and demonstrate reliable operation of the vehicle at the friction limits on a complex dirt track. We reach speeds above 27 m/h (12 m/s) on a dirt track with a 105 ft (32 m) long straight using our 1:5 scale test vehicle.

We present an information-theoretic approach to stochastic optimal control problems that can be used to derive general sampling-based optimization schemes. This new mathematical method is used to develop a sampling-based model predictive control algorithm. We apply this information-theoretic model predictive control scheme to the task of aggressive autonomous driving around a dirt test track, and compare its performance with a model predictive control version of the cross-entropy method.

The Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K) is enabling the collection of high-frequency mobile sensor data for the development and validation of novel multisensory biomarkers and sensor-triggered interventions.

Behavioral imaging encompasses the use of computational sensing and modeling techniques to measure and analyze human behavior. This article discusses a research program focused on the study of dyadic social interactions between children and their caregivers and peers. The study has resulted in a dataset containing semi-structured play interactions between children and adults. Behavioral imaging could broadly affect the quality of care for individuals with a developmental or behavioral disorder.

Current Google image search adopt a hybrid search approach in which a text-based query (e.g., “Paris landmarks”) is used to retrieve a set of relevant images, which are then refined by the user (e.g., by re-ranking the retrieved images based on similarity to a selected example). We conjecture that given such hybrid image search engines, learning per-query distance functions over image features can improve the estimation of image similarity. We propose scalable solutions to learning query-specific distance functions by 1) adopting a simple large-margin learning framework, 2) using the query-logs of text-based image search engine to train distance functions used in content-based systems. We evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed system through comprehensive human evaluation, and compare the results with the state-of-the-art image distance function used by Google image search.

As a controllable medium, video-realistic crowds are important for creating the illusion of a populated reality in special effects, games, and architectural visualization. While recent progress in simulation and motion captured-based techniques for crowd synthesis has focused on natural macroscale behavior, this paper addresses the complementary problem of synthesizing crowds with realistic microscale behavior and appearance. Example-based synthesis methods such as video textures are an appealing alternative to conventional model-based methods, but current techniques are unable to represent and satisfy constraints between video sprites and the scene. This paper describes how to synthesize crowds by segmenting pedestrians from input videos of natural crowds and optimally placing them into an output video while satisfying environmental constraints imposed by the scene. We introduce crowd tubes, a representation of video objects designed to compose a crowd of video billboards while avoiding collisions between static and dynamic obstacles. The approach consists of representing crowd tube samples and constraint violations with a conflict graph. The maximal independent set yields a dense constraint-satisfying crowd composition. We present a prototype system for the capture, analysis, synthesis, and control of video-based crowds. Several results demonstrate the system's ability to generate videos of crowds which exhibit a variety of natural behaviors.

A real-time and accurate object detection framework, C4, is proposed in this paper. C4 achieves 20 fps speed and the state-of-the-art detection accuracy, using only one processing thread without resorting to special hardware such as GPU. The real-time accurate object detection is made possible by two contributions. First, we conjecture (with supporting experiments) that contour is what we should capture and signs of comparisons among neighboring pixels are the key information to capture contour cues. Second, we show that the CENTRIST visual descriptor is suitable for contour based object detection, because it encodes the sign information and can implicitly represent the global contour. When CENTRIST and linear classifier are used, we propose a computational method that does not need to explicitly generate feature vectors. It involves no image preprocessing or feature vector normalization, and only requires O(1) steps to test an image patch. C4 is also friendly to further hardware acceleration. It has been applied to detect objects such as pedestrians, faces, and cars on benchmark data sets. It has comparable detection accuracy with state-of-the-art methods, and has a clear advantage in detection speed.

CENsus TRansform hISTogram (CENTRIST), a new visual descriptor for recognizing topological places or scene categories, is introduced in this paper. We show that place and scene recognition, especially for indoor environments, require its visual descriptor to possess properties that are different from other vision domains (e.g., object recognition). CENTRIST satisfies these properties and suits the place and scene recognition task. It is a holistic representation and has strong generalizability for category recognition. CENTRIST mainly encodes the structural properties within an image and suppresses detailed textural information. Our experiments demonstrate that CENTRIST outperforms the current state of the art in several place and scene recognition data sets, compared with other descriptors such as SIFT and Gist. Besides, it is easy to implement and evaluates extremely fast.

A cascade face detector uses a sequence of node classifiers to distinguish faces from nonfaces. This paper presents a new approach to design node classifiers in the cascade detector. Previous methods used machine learning algorithms that simultaneously select features and form ensemble classifiers. We argue that if these two parts are decoupled, we have the freedom to design a classifier that explicitly addresses the difficulties caused by the asymmetric learning goal. There are three contributions in this paper: The first is a categorization of asymmetries in the learning goal and why they make face detection hard. The second is the forward feature selection (FFS) algorithm and a fast precomputing strategy for AdaBoost. FFS and the fast AdaBoost can reduce the training time by approximately 100 and 50 times, in comparison to a naive implementation of the AdaBoost feature selection method. The last contribution is a linear asymmetric classifier (LAC), a classifier that explicitly handles the asymmetric learning goal as a well-defined constrained optimization problem. We demonstrated experimentally that LAC results in an improved ensemble classifier performance.

In this paper, we present an example-based system for terrain synthesis. In our approach, patches from a sample terrain (represented by a height field) are used to generate a new terrain. The synthesis is guided by a user-sketched feature map that specifies where terrain features occur in the resulting synthetic terrain. Our system emphasizes large-scale curvilinear features (ridges and valleys) because such features are the dominant visual elements in most terrains. Both the example height field and user's sketch map are analyzed using a technique from the field of geomorphology. The system finds patches from the example data that match the features found in the user's sketch. Patches are joined together using graph cuts and Poisson editing. The order in which patches are placed in the synthesized terrain is determined by breadth-first traversal of a feature tree and this generates improved results over standard raster-scan placement orders. Our technique supports user-controlled terrain synthesis in a wide variety of styles, based upon the visual richness of real-world terrain data.

Emerging application domains such as interactive vision, animation, and multimedia collaboration display dynamic scalable parallelism and high-computational requirements, making them good candidates for executing on parallel architectures such as SMPs and clusters of SMPs. Stampede is a programming system that has many of the needed functionalities such as high-level data sharing, dynamic cluster-wide threads and their synchronization, support for task and data parallelism, handling of time-sequenced data items, and automatic buffer management. We present an overview of Stampede, the primary data abstractions, the algorithmic basis of garbage collection, and the issues in implementing these abstractions on a cluster of SMPs. We also present a set of micromeasurements along with two multimedia applications implemented on top of Stampede, through which we demonstrate the low overhead of this runtime and that it is suitable for the streaming multimedia applications.

Bayesian network models provide an attractive framework for multimodal sensor fusion. They combine an intuitive graphical representation with efficient algorithms for inference and learning. However, the unsupervised nature of standard parameter learning algorithms for Bayesian networks can lead to poor performance in classification tasks. We have developed a supervised learning framework for Bayesian networks, which is based on the Adaboost algorithm of Schapire and Freund. Our framework covers static and dynamic Bayesian networks with both discrete and continuous states. We have tested our framework in the context of a novel multimodal HCI application: a speech-based command and control interface for a Smart Kiosk. We provide experimental evidence for the utility of our boosted learning approach.

THE last 10 years have witnessed rapid growth in the popularity of graphical models, most notably Bayesian networks, as a tool for representing, learning, and computing complex probability distributions. Graphical models provide an explicit representation of the statistical dependencies between the components of a complex probability model, effectively marrying probability theory and graph theory. As Jordan puts it in [2], graphical models are “a natural tool for dealing with two problems that occur throughout applied mathematics and engineering—uncertainty and complexity—and, in particular, they are playing an increasingly important role in the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms.” Graphical models provide powerful computational support for the Bayesian approach to computer vision, which has become a standard framework for addressing vision problems. Many familiar tools from the vision literature, such as Markov random fields, hidden Markov models, and the Kalman filter, are instances of graphical models. More importantly, the graphical models formalism makes it possible to generalize these tools and develop novel statistical representations and associated algorithms for inference and learning. The history of graphical models in computer vision follows closely that of graphical models in general. Research by Pearl [3] and Lauritzen [4] in the late 1980s played a seminal role in introducing this formalism to areas of AI and statistical learning. Not long after, the formalism spread to fields such as statistics, systems engineering, information theory, pattern recognition, and, among others, computer vision. One of the earliest occurrences of graphical models in the vision literature was a paper by Binford et al. [1]. The paper described the use of Bayesian inference in a hierarchical probability model to match 3D object models to groupings of curves in a single image. The following year marked the publication of Pearl’s influential book [3] on graphical models. Since then, many technical papers have been published in IEEE journals and conference proceedings that address different aspects and applications of graphical models in computer vision. Our goal in organizing this special section was to demonstrate the breadth of applicability of the graphical models formalism to vision problems. Our call for papers in February 2002 produced 16 submissions. After a careful review process, we selected six papers for publication, including five regular papers, and one short paper. These papers reflect the state-of-the-art in the use of graphical models in vision problems that range from low-level image understanding to high-level scene interpretation. We believe these papers will appeal both to vision researchers who are actively engaged in the use of graphical models and machine learning researchers looking for a challenging application domain. The first paper in this section is “Stereo Matching Using Belief Propagation” by J. Sun, N.-N. Zheng, and H.-Y. Shum. The authors describe a new stereo algorithm based on loopy belief propagation, a powerful inference technique for complex graphical models in which exact inference is intractable. They formulate the dense stereo matching problem as MAP estimation on coupled Markov random fields and obtain promising results on standard test data sets. One of the benefits of this formulation, as the authors demonstrate, is the ease with which it can be extended to handle multiview stereo matching. In their paper “Statistical Cue Integration of DAG Deformable Models” S.K. Goldenstein, C. Vogler, and D. Metaxas describe a scheme for combining different sources of information into estimates of the parameters of a deformable model. They use a DAG representation of the interdependencies between the nodes in a deformable model. This framework supports the efficient integration of information from edges and other cues using the machinery of affine arithmetic and the propagation of uncertainties. They present experimental results for a face tracking application. Y. Song, L. Goncalves, and P. Perona describe, in their paper “Unsupervised Learning of Human Motion,” a method for learning probabilistic models of human motion from video sequences in cluttered scenes. Two key advantages of their method are its unsupervised nature, which can mitigate the need for tedious hand labeling of data, and the utilization of graphical model constraints to reduce the search space when fitting a human figure model. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PATTERN ANALYSIS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE, VOL. 25, NO. 7, JULY 2003 785